As BETTER CALL SAUL heads into its final season, I'm writing about each week about the last episode. This week it's "Rock and Hard Place," written and directed by Gordon Smith.
It's a big episode in the overall mythology of SAUL, as one of its main characters comes to their... resolution. One of my favorites, too.
But the thing I want highlight is the way the story sets into motion. After a very weird opening pan, which lands on something in the dirt -- a classic SAUL technique, and really a variation on a caper technique; I'm showing you something without any context to make it clear, this is important but now you'll have to just ride along to see why or even what it is--we cut to Nacho where we left him in the prior episode, fleeing from her pursuers in a shot up pick up truck.
For the first 15 minutes we stay with him as he hides in an oil tanker, holding his breath under the oil for a really long time while the Evil Twins come looking for him, and then finding temporary refuge in a used car shop. It's like the one truly nice guy he's met in forever. (One of the things that' interesting about this episode is the variety of ways this sequence signals where things are headed: He's driving a broken down pick up; he drowns in oil; he's helped by a truly good person; he leaves a wad of money covered in blood.)
And then... he picks up the phone and calls Mike. And suddenly we're back in the other half of a moment we saw happen in the last episode: Mike talking on a phone, gun to his head, then giving the phone to Fring.
BETTER CALL SAUL likes this technique. It's certainly been done before, but not much: LOST was so in love with this move that it would sometimes do three episodes in a row that each began with a different character entering into the same moment we've already seen. And for them it was often about adding information that would cause us to reinterpret what we had already witnessed. It was a Flash Retcon kind of move.
Here, the point is not to surprise us. Instead, it's about building momentum and establishing a sort of starting line (which is also kind of the finish line). This episode is 100% Nacho's story (well, 95% and 5% Mike's). So start to finish Smith wants us to be on the journey with him. The stuff we hadn't seen that happens before the call is like the booster rockets that launch Nacho forward.
You could say, do we really need to have the scene in 602 to accomplish any of that? And maybe not; maybe in part it's just another form of caper-ing, Hey Look, there's something big at work but we're not going to tell you what yet.
But I actually think having that earlier moment in 602 creates a kind of Lock In Point for Nacho's story. Once his story syncs up with 602, we're at the point of engines on full burn. The phone call is when we hit atmosphere and the boosters can fall away. But given the content of that moment, it's also the point of no return. In fact I think it kind of foreshadows the end of episode. Gus can't harm Nacho because he already fucking died in that oil, and then a kindly Charon took him helped him to get across the river Styx.
And of course we end on the image we started, but now we know what we're looking at. Mystery solved.
For me, the takeaway is really the perennial question when you're writing: What is the most interesting way to tell my character's story?
